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Fried Eggs

A fried egg dish with butter, sea salt, eschalot, breadcrumbs, water, and vinegar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Fried Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Fry the eggs

  1. Melt the butter in a frying pan and let it brown.

  2. Carefully break the eggs one by one into the pan, preventing them from spreading.

  3. Sprinkle salt over the eggs.

  4. When the eggs are a nice color, remove them with a skimmer and place them on a hot dish.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Mix the chopped eschalot with the remaining butter in the pan.

  2. Add the bread crumbs, sprinkle with salt, and stir.

  3. Add a few drops of water and 3 drops of vinegar.

  4. Pour this sauce over the eggs and serve hot.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + vinegartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Bread + vinegartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,672 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set into a firm, tender structure when fried, forming the body of the dish.
Butter
Fat that fries the eggs and, browned, adds a nutty aroma to the sauce.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the browned butter and thicken the sauce, giving it body and texture.
Eschalot
Adds a mild, savoury aromatic sweetness to the browned butter sauce.
Vinegar
Adds a small amount of acidity that brightens the rich, buttery sauce.

The step that matters

Carefully break the eggs one by one into the pan. Eggs spread when cracked into hot fat, and crowding or breaking them together makes them run into each other. Adding them one at a time, close to the surface of the fat, keeps each egg compact and evenly cooked.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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